tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861605.post1959596788010621297..comments2024-02-20T13:32:06.704-05:00Comments on Resource Insights: Economists are from MediocristanKurt Cobbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05330759091950742285noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861605.post-27342994265625255432012-02-11T10:17:01.340-05:002012-02-11T10:17:01.340-05:00The Extremistan/Mediocristan distinction was laid ...The Extremistan/Mediocristan distinction was laid before us in The Black Swan and can only be interpreted as meta-guidance for applied mathematicians. Actually it was meta-nonsense for people who had never applied mathematics, never intended to apply mathematics, but wanted to think deep thoughts about other people who applied mathematics ... but let's set that aside and examine it on it's merits. <br /><br />Taleb presented a perfectly clear instruction manual. The world has linear and non-linear phenomena. But mathematicians have to be careful, he argued, not to use the wrong kind of mathematics. You wouldn't want to use linear mathematics to model a non-linear problem best treated with fractals, power laws and so forth now, would you? And I suppose you wouldn't want to use fractals to model a linear system either - though Taleb is highly skeptical that any exist so that is a decidedly less important topic.<br /><br />Take web page popularity. It follows a Zipf distribution, landing it squarely in the groovy world of power laws. So it would be a massive mistake to try to apply linear mathematics to it, right? To me more precise I'd say it would be a massive mistake, a violation of a universal principal no less, to apply Linear Algebra to it, much less a singular value decomposition which is about as close to the epicenter of "linear mathematics" (to humor that ridiculous phrase) as one could surely get. Strange then, that Larry Page sought fit to do so when inventing Page Rank, the algorithm distinguishing Google from Yahoo that powered the greatest commercial success in recent history.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.quantapology.com" rel="nofollow">Peter</a>Peter Cottonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05565219939665267344noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861605.post-81561629974842941102007-06-06T06:42:00.000-04:002007-06-06T06:42:00.000-04:00Hi.Thanks for this post I listened to a podcast ( ...Hi.<BR/>Thanks for this post I listened to a podcast ( http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/taleb_on_black.html )and was left asking for more and your post has helpd clarify alot.<BR/>I havent read the book yet but Nassim Taleb is one thinker I haved really come to respect.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com